This isn't about what I cooked, but I can't think of a more appropriate thread.
My wife and I were out and about in Tulsa yesterday, and driving down a particularly bumpy, constructiony, trafficy road, I suddenly shouted "OH SHIT!" and whipped the car around. As my wife was shouting in a panic about what (or who) we hit, I exclaimed 'ESTATE SALE' and ripped down a side street.
If you've never been to an estate sale, or you don't have them in your country of origin, here's how they work: Somebody dies or goes to a retirement home or loses their mind, and the family is either too lazy or snooty to divine up their loved one's posessions, so they (usually) hire a third party to hawk off the goods when somebody finally says "Look, the house is just sitting there, and I have bills to pay." I'd love to pretend it's less grim than that, but I've never, ever been to one of these things that didn't have the air of "I really don't care that Gran is dead all that much".
My wife and I love these things because every estate sale is a time capsule of kitschy Americana. A lot of them have interiors straight out of the 70s and the 80s. Pantries full of ancient spices, kitchen gadgets from companies that don't exist anymore. Cheap faux stag-handled knives with stamped blades. Huge collections of coffee mugs. Tarnished flatware. That kind of thing. The best part is the cookbooks. Huge stacks of old cookbooks from the 70s. Southern home living, betty crocker, better homes and gardens, and then of course wonderful things like The Crisco Cookbook, The Knox Cookbook, Cooking With Jello, etc. Food from 1960 thru the end of the 70s was a fucking trainwreck. Aspic everywhere. Mayonnaise where it does not belong. Lemon Jello salad with a smucker's grape jelly vinaigrette. Fluffy Salmon Pie. I'm not making this shit up.
So we walk into this place expecting... well, you know. More of the same. More 1970s garbage cookbooks. More silly, impractical kitchen gadgets from SEARS catalogs of a by-gone era that we don't need but will inevitably buy.
What we found was the home of someone who we could only aspire to be. Being in this woman's house filled me with a profound, deep sadness. It was like stepping into your own grave. She had thousands, and I mean thousands of cookbooks. And I'm not talking about better homes and garden's cookbook of the month. French cookbooks, italian cookbooks, german cookbooks, jewish cookbooks. Many of the foreign cookbooks in their original languages. Some of the books were years old - we found a dutch cookbook from the turn of the century, a creole cookbook from 1916. A frontier cookbook from the Oklahoma land rush. Every book in her collection was marked with her name, her address, and the date she obtained the book. Some of them were marked with inscriptions from who gave her the book, or where she picked the book up. Her primary tastes seemed to lie in French Cuisine, which took up the greatest portion of her collection.
She had dozens of sets of fine china, crystal glasses. Her fine flatware was gold-plated to prevent transfer of flavor. Her knife drawer? Real stag-handled steak knives and carving knives. Two 60 year old Sabatier Jeune chef's knives, supplemented with a Dexter Cleaver and some kind of Dexter butcher's knife. The handles were worn down from years of use.
Her cabinet was filled with fine spices and extracts. The only gadgets we could find were professional baking tools. Her pots and pans had mostly been sold off already, with the exception of some stuff out in the garage - a pile of Griswold and Lodge cast iron pans, pots, ovens and griddles half as tall as me, and a deep, thick-bottomed stock pot which had seen it's fair share of use.
I wish I'd known this woman. I wish I'd been part of her family, just so I could have had a chance to taste her cooking. After we got done at the estate sale, I tried to track her down, see if there was anything about her online - all I could find was an obituary blurb. She died in february, and all this time her house had just sat empty.
Where was her family? Why didn't anyone want any of these things? I can understand the cookbooks, the cutlery. But the flatware, the china? The pots and pans? Didn't anyone have memories of her cooking for them? Didn't her children, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews remember how important cooking was to her? Did she even have a family, or did she die alone? Was there anyone even at her funeral?
We bought one of her Sabatiers, which is badly in need of sharpening, and a few cookbooks, the most noteworthy of which being La Cuisine De France and Chinese Cuisine: the Wei-Chaun Chinese Cooking Book. (Which is apparently THE guide to authentic chinese cooking. It's a dual language edition.) Once I get the knife sharpened, I plan to delve into both books and do some serious cooking, in her memory. I might not have known her, but I know we shared a common love of cooking. Maybe her family just didn't.
